Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Back in November a team at Cornell led by Oya Rieger and Tim Murray produced a white
paper for the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled Preserving
and Emulating Digital Art Objects.
It was the result of two years of research into how continuing access could be provided
to the optical disk holdings of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell. Below the fold, some comments on the white paper.

The fundamental reasons for the failure are lack of decentralization at both the organizational and technical levels. You have to read Mike's post to understand the organizational issues, which would probably have doomed Bitcoin irrespective of the technical issues. They prevented Bitcoin responding to the need to increase the block size. But the block size is a minor technical issue compared to the fact that:

the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage.

As Mike says:

Even if a new team was built to replace Bitcoin Core, the problem of
mining power being concentrated behind the Great Firewall would remain.
Bitcoin has no future whilst it’s controlled by fewer than 10 people.
And there’s no solution in sight for this problem: nobody even has any
suggestions. For a community that has always worried about the block
chain being taken over by an oppressive government, it is a rich irony.

Friday, January 15, 2016

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, after pr0n, the most important genre of content on the Internet is cat videos. But in the early days of the Web, there was no video. For sure, there was pr0n, but how did the Internet work without cat videos? Follow me below the fold for some research into the early history of Web content.

Ilya's work is much more important that I originally realized. It isn't just a very good example of the way that emulation can layer useful services over archived content. It is also a different approach to delivering emulations, leveraging the current trend towards containers and thus less dependent on specialized, preservation-only technology.

I asked Ilya to write a guest post explaining how it works, which is below the fold.

We learned in the recent surge of oldweb.today (that uses MemGator
to aggregate mementos from various archives) that some upstream
archives had issues handling the sudden increase in the traffic and had
to be removed from the list of aggregated archives.

Second, the overlap between the collections at different Web archives is low, as shown in Sawood's diagram. This means that the contribution of even small Web archives to the effectiveness of the aggregated whole is significant.This is important in an environment where the Internet Archive has by far the biggest collection of preserved Web pages. It can be easy to think that the efforts of other Web archives add little. But Sawood's research shows that, if they can be effectively aggregated, even small Web archives can make a contribution.

Now, Glynn Moody at Techdirt points to a column in The Globe and Mail by Dan Breznitz, professor of Innovation
Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of
Toronto. Breznitz explains that the TPP not merely greatly increases the intellectual property protections for both copyrights and patents, but also for trade secrets. Below the fold, details of some of the ways in which added protection for trade secrets is a catastrophically bad idea.